New Release Review - The Watch

Directed by: Akiva Schaffer

Starring: Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, Richard Ayoade, Rosemarie DeWitt, Will Forte, R Lee Ermey

Area busybody Stiller puts together a neighborhood watch outfit which soon finds itself battling aliens.

Unlike most Europeans, I'm not anti-American. No other country has privided me with so much entertainment so how could I be? Movies like this however make it a lot easier to understand why Hollywood and the United States in general irritate so many people. This is more than just a bad movie. I see hundreds of movies a year, half of which are awful, I can handle a movie failing as a piece of entertainment. What I won't accept is the sort of xenophobic, homophobic bullshit that this piece of cinematic excrement shoves down our throats. Take Ayoade, a talented film-maker in his own right, who seems to have been cast purely because we're supposed to find it amusing that a black man speaks with a posh British accent. (Wow, a black guy with an education, that's hilarious!) Even the trailer mocks his surname. (Those foreigners are soo funny!) Then we have the effeminate neighbor of Stiller, thrown in for cruel and cheap laughs. Don't even get me started on the Mexican security guard. The joke has always been that Hollywood aims it's movies solely at Middle America. They obviously think Middle America is full of racists and homophobes. I'd like to believe this isn't the case.

At a time when gun control is once again a hot topic for Americans the central characters here are particularly despicable, a bunch of sexist, materialistic gun-nuts. The movie had it's release delayed in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting and in an ironic twist it was released in America the weekend a whacko decided to massacre a bunch of Colorado cinema-goers. The bad timing continued when it's European release coincided with the sentencing of Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik. Three occasions when bigotry and the glorification of guns are making headlines. Nice work Hollywood.

On top of all that, this movie has some of the most flagrant product placement I've seen for a long time. Half the movie is set in a CostCo outlet and there are blatant commercials for everything from 3D TV's to Trojan condoms shoehorned brazenly into the film. So now even during a 2D film we get 3D shoved down our throats? Great. Hey Hollywood, here's a crazy left-field idea for you to ponder. Instead of trying to get people into cinemas with gimmicks how about enticing them back by making some good movies once in a while? I know, crazy right?

What about the plot, you ask? Well if you saw last year's equally detestable yet technically far superior "Attack the Block" you've seen this already. "The Watch" just swaps despicable lower class Brits for despicable middle class Americans. 

1/10

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